DOJ eyes gun trafficking as violence bedevils US
WASHINGTON – Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed Thursday that the Justice Department will crack down on gun trafficking corridors as part of a comprehensive approach to combat surging gun violence that also includes funding community intervention programs and other neighborhood groups.
Garland returned to his hometown of Chicago, where shootings have soared this year, as the Justice Department launched strike forces to confront the rise in gun violence in five U.S. cities: Chicago, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Garland met with agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and said he hoped the Senate will confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the agency to help front the federal effort against gun violence. The nomination of David Chipman has been stalled as Republicans and the National Rifle Association work to sink it. Chipman is a veteran of the ATF who served as an adviser to a major gun control group and would be the first formal leader since 2015.
Garland said federal prosecutors in Chicago and the other cities were “linked up” with federal prosecutors across jurisdictions, particularly in places where guns are bought legally and later trafficked into major cities with more restrictive gun laws.
Garland said law enforcement also needs to work with community organizations to make the Justice Department’s initiative successful, and those organizations need to trust law enforcement. “We can’t hope to solve this problem without some of both,” he said, referring to community intervention and law enforcement.
Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco met with ATF agents in Washington before traveling to Chicago.
“We all know our job is to go after those who pull the trigger,” Monaco said. “Our job is also of course to go after the sources of those guns, the corridors that they travel in and the networks that feed those guns to the places where they are doing the most violent crime, and that is what this series of strike force efforts is all about.”
In addition to prioritizing gun crimes, the strike forces will embrace intelligence sharing and prosecutions across jurisdictions, Justice Department officials said. Authorities have also embedded federal agents in homicide units of police departments across the U.S., have been deploying additional crime analysts and are conducting fugitive sweeps to arrest people who have outstanding state and federal warrants for violent crimes.
In Chicago, there is skepticism and worry. The Rev. Marvin Hunter has held multiple news conferences in recent weeks objecting to the strike forces – which many residents believe will flood their neighborhoods with more police – or any solution that relies on police to curb the violence.
He and other residents of the predominantly Black and Latino west side of Chicago said they’re afraid having police focus more on their neighborhoods will lead to “attacks” on Black and brown men and women. Hunter is the great-uncle of Laquan Mcdonald, who died after he was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer.
Violent crimes, particularly homicides and shootings, are up in many cities around the country, and the Biden administration has sought to aid communities hamstrung by violence. But the initiative begun this week differs from other recent federal efforts to address violence, because it is not sending agents or prosecutors into cities with crime spikes. Justice officials say the strike forces are targeted prosecutions meant to be a longer-term effort to combat gun trafficking.
Officials hope the new plan will mean federal prosecutors in some of the supply cities will be more likely to bring charges in those cases.